"Splash! Could that be the sound of Lord Mandelson hitting one of the Dolce hotel's four pools? Or Robert Zoellick of the World Bank? Paul Volcker of the US Economic Recovery Advisory Board? Or merely the euro taking another dive? That is the thing about the Bilderberg group's top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints. Across the worl

In the spirit of Christmas grumpiness, arts personalities reveal the heritage classics they secretly can't stand. Below, a sampling:
Nicky Haslam, interior designer, on Monty Python
"It leaves me absolutely cold. Cleese and those other guys are completely up their own arses. It is humour made for dolts. I never made it through a complete episode of Flying

"Martin Hughes, the high-profile hedge fund manager known as "the rottweiler" is bloodied but unbowed after his tussles with the collapsing stock market last year," the Times Online reports. "He is predicting that the stock market is at the start of a five to ten-year bull run from which his shrunken Toscafund is poised to benefit.""Mr Hughe

"The prospect of a human baby with three biological parents has moved closer after scientists created monkeys using a technique that one day could stop children from inheriting severe genetic diseases," the Times Online reported. "The technique is controversial, however, because the children it creates would inherit genetic material from three parents."

"Whatever happens in the next few months - and some serious risks still lie ahead - it is now clear that a rerun of the 1930s Great Depression has been avoided," writes Anatole Kaletsky. "The Great Recession, which was predicted by many economists and pundits to be far deeper and more intractable than any previous postwar downturn, may go down in history as the Great Exa